From our first issue in the overwhelming immediate aftermath to last week’s examination of the still-growing number of victims, New York has spent two and a half decades trying to illuminate and grapple with the meaning of the horrifying attack on our city on September 11, 2001. For this year’s anniversary, we’ve compiled just some of the most compelling coverage from our archive, including a number of digitally restored articles and cover stories which newer readers might not be familiar with.
For our first issue following the attacks, more than three dozen reporters compiled a gripping chronicle of individual New Yorkers’ experiences from across the city on September 11 and the next two days. From the introduction:
The TV and the newspapers called it an attack on America, which was true, but, in the moment, irrelevant: It was an attack on us. We didn’t experience it through the mediation of CNN, but on sidewalks or rooftops or terraces or parks – if we were lucky enough not to be in the midst of it. The bursting, pulsing fireballs, and the smoke billowing off over the Woolworth Building toward Brooklyn, held a terrible beauty – until we realized that, yes, those were people jumping from the towers. Our neighbors were dying, and we were watching; it’s hard, days later, to remember this without fighting away tears.“Daddy, is it real?” a son asked a father, seeing the towers aflame on TV. “That can’t happen in my house, right?” What a hard question to answer, now. The week progressed from shock and amazement to a deep grief for our neighbors under the rubble and their families.Still, the terrorists – people who understand nothing about us, by the way – dealt a blow to something else: our cynicism. Throughout the week, there was a sense of civic nobility, exemplified by the heroism of the firefighters, climbing the stairs against the human current toward what they knew was an inferno. That’s one of the stories of last week. There is a city full of others.
